Decoding Election Manifestos: What are the policies for the future?

Decoding Election Manifestos: What are the policies for the future?

Ajit Phadnis & Vivek. V

Ajit Phadnis is a doctoral student at the Centre for Public Policy,
Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore. Vivek V. is a public
policy enthusiast.

Every Independence Day brings forth a fresh opportunity to revive the
debate on our developmental path. Are we undertaking appropriate
policies? Are the existing policies being implemented to the optimum?
are two recurring questions. Often they are sought to be answered
through a complex analysis of factual data and policy evaluations which
are rich in insights, but tend to take-for-granted their inherent
assumption that policies are created in a political vacuum.

In reality, most policy proposals are severely constrained within the
bounds of political discourse, a term that typifies the conversations in
political circles. Consider for instance, the case of three landmark
policy initiatives of the last decade: the Right to Information, Right
to education and Employment Guarantee programme. All of them graduated
to policy only after sustained presence in political discourse. Even on
few occasions where policy has preceded political discourse, like what
happened with trade and investment liberalization, policy implementation
has been successful only as far as it has aligned with the incumbent
political discourse.

Future innovations in policy have quite clearly to find their parentage
in the creativity of the political discourse that exists today. This
means that to predict the future of policy, we need to understand the
nature of our current political discourse. For instance, are the
political conversations directed to explore new ways to enhance farm
productivity. Or are they advocating for new tools to enable access to
better healthcare? Are we finding new mechanisms to empower the
disadvantaged? Or what are the new instruments to empower governance? To
investigate this we consider the political discourse contained in the
powerful but largely under-leveraged documents, the election manifestos
of political parties.

For this study, we examined the election manifestos for the Karnataka
State elections in 2013 presented by the three large political parties:
the Indian National Congress (INC), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
and the Janata Dal- Secular (JD(S)). The reasons for choosing Karnataka
are three-fold. Firstly, because the state had the most recently held
elections, the last national elections, in comparison, took place more
than four years ago. Secondly, both the prominent national parties INC
and BJP presented manifestos here, which in a sense is a precursor to
the national battle next year. Thirdly, Karnataka stands somewhere in
the middle of the country in terms of its ranking on human development,
but at the same time it has demonstrated its capability to be a pioneer
for innovation in the IT, Bio-Technology industries as well as many
governance reforms. These attributes make the study of Karnataka
election manifestos an engaging exercise.

Cross comparisons of manifestos suggests a broad congruence in the
vision of development across the three political parties. While the
slogans are carefully customized to align with their respective party
ideologies, the Congress’s promise of ‘Clean Governance, able
Leadership’, the BJP’s idea of ‘Progress’ and the JD(S)’s focus on
‘Equality & Justice’ do not look considerably different with regard
to the issues they propose to address. All three manifestos are strong
in their support for agriculture and farmers, promote a conducive
climate for investments, promise better governance, envision access to
better health and education, advocate for social justice and reflect a
growing sense of environment consciousness. Their distinctiveness lies
in the specific initiatives proposed to fulfill these common goals.

For the agricultural sector, all parties persist with their
long-standing promises of assuring fair price for agricultural produce
and supporting farmers in the purchase of agricultural inputs. But in
addition the Congress and BJP manifestos also reflect a futuristic
vision for agriculture through promotion of Organic farming. All three
parties advocate for farming methods that are less water-intensive such
as drip irrigation. Encouragement to Solar energy powered irrigation
pump-sets are a new initiative reflected across parties.

For attracting industrial investments, the parties have gone beyond
their traditional comfort-zones. The Congress advocates for the creation
of a North-South corridor of industrial development with a thrust on
expediting the process of land acquisition for industries, BJP talks
about organizing bi-annual industrial meets and measures to encourage
NRI investors. Even the predominantly rural based party, the JD(S),
proposes to provide land for industries on ‘very cheap monthly lease
basis’.

With regard to the much needed governance reforms, the Congress
manifesto reflects a renewed thrust towards decentralization by ‘giving
supremacy to Gram Sabhas’, the lowest tier of governance in rural India.
Both the BJP and JD(S) mention about local empowerment in towns and
cities through constitution of Ward Committees, which adds a new tier of
governance at the local level. The subject of decentralization has all
along attracted policy advocates, but this perhaps is the first time
that such strongly worded proposals are seen in political discourse.

There are also some innovative propositions for health-care delivery.
Congress proposes to extend health-care delivery to the doorsteps of
individual homes by operating mobile hospital-cum ambulance services.
Connecting all rural health centres with tele-medicine is the highlight
of the BJP’s health initiatives. JD(S), meanwhile, advocates for a
revolution in the health-care system by replicating the system of the
National Health Service (NHS) of UK!

The manifestos also reflect a systemic approach to empower women.
Both the BJP and JD(S) announce tax incentives to houses that are
registered in the name of women. BJP goes a step further in mandating
that all government granted houses are to be registered in the woman’s
name.

A growing sense of environmental consciousness is visible. A rather
concealed consensus exists among parties on promoting solar energy,
which occupies a significant chunk of their energy proposals. In
addition to this, are programmes for mandating energy audits of
buildings, encouraging rain-water harvesting, recycling of water and
instituting tax exemptions for electricity-powered vehicles.

These proposals demonstrate a sense of progressiveness in political
discourse. One would like to see many of these manifesto promises
graduate to policies in the near future. But given India’s checkered
legacy with polices, it is only natural that our optimism be peppered
with hints of healthy skepticism.

In essence, the manifestos throw light on the fact that our political
parties can indeed be thinking institutions. Parties do look beyond
their regional and national confines for best practices that can be
locally accommodated. The emergence of parties such as Loksatta and Aam
Aadmi is likely to further fuel the political discourse and generate a
flood of new ideas. There is reason to be optimistic on this
Independence Day and to raise a toast to the future of India!